I went web-surfing a bit ago and I wonder if what is happening to my brain is what happens to the brains of alcoholics due to malnutrition, specifically thiamine deficiency.  I am noticing certain patterns.  A lot of patterns in fact.  This thing comes and goes, though, and seems to vary as to how much I am aware of it, how fast time flies by, how fast I forget things, how well or poorly I can concentrate, how long it takes for me to make simple decisions and perform simple tasks (such as getting dressed, preparing Puzzle for her walk, etc).  I never, never feel well physically anymore.  I always seem to either have a headache or strange feeling in my head, or am nauseous or crampy in my stomach or intestines, feel weak and faint and lightheaded and wobbly, and am sometimes deeply depressed to the point that I am unable to get out of bed.  Here is the link:

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/794583-overview#showall

Dr. K had me get my blood tested and did all the usual examinations.  They are all very worried about me.  I didn’t hear from her later today so I assume nothing came out super urgent (my kidneys haven’t failed, in other words).  My next appointment with her is on Friday next week.

I think that I have been able to make a fair amount of sense while speaking today.  I spoke with the minister, and he said I was making sense.  It was hard to tell.  I forgot the beginning of a sentence by the time I got to its end.  I was able to write, but I’m not entirely certain of this, either.  At one point at the library, I felt faint, and again, confused, but about what I don’t recall.  I make a point of being polite.  It’s very, very important to be polite and kind.

Actually, she was the person I needed to talk to.

I told her lots of things.  This would include my immediate difficulty trying to take a shower because first of all, I hate my body and I can’t stand looking at it or touching it right now and I have bad feelings about my weight and shape.  Secondly, I do not want to die in the nude and have been afraid to spend any time naked whatsoever for fear that I will be “caught” in the nude and frozen in my death without clothes on.  For months, I have made two exceptions: shower, and weighing myself.

I told her a few other things besides that.  Just some stuff going on over the past weeks, months that I never told her, maybe no one ever found out the whole story, maybe I’m finally telling it now.  Secrets.

She asked  me if I was going to show up at my PCP appointment tomorrow.  I told her I was planning to cancel.  She told me I’d better show up.  So I will.

Shower.  Spend a lot of time sleeping.  Take Puzzle out.  There were a couple of other things but they don’t come to mind right now.  Then call the crisis team back and let them know I survived the past two hours okay and I’m still alive.  (Most of the time, when I reach out I get slapped.  Thankfully, when I called these guys just now, someone who gives a shit answered the phone.)

I slept all day today.  I slept just about all day yesterday.  Yesterday I dragged myself out of bed and went to therapy, came home and went back to bed and have been in bed ever since.

My head hurts.

Sunday I went to church.  I’m not going to make it to church next Sunday at this rate.

My phone.  Yes, it does ring, but who calls?  Telemarketers and “professional fundraisers” on behalf of bogus charities that prey on the elderly and anyone else they think they can snare.  I get these calls about twice a day, maybe more.   Being on the National Do Not Call List hasn’t gotten rid of them.  What I am saying is, my phone is no longer a tool for useful, intelligent human conversation anymore.

Therapy.  I normally see my T twice a week.  Surely, this is intelligent human conversation.  But this week, I canceled not one, but both sessions.  Monday I was sick.  Thursday I was sick.  I screwed up somewhat the week before as well.  I can assure you that my T is very unhappy with me right now.  I can assure you that my T has possibly even fired me.  So much for further opportunity for intelligent human conversation.

Not that this is the only reason I go to therapy.  But the lack of human out-loud conversation this week has been so extreme that if it weren’t for the fact that I babble to myself non-stop every night as I’m headed to bed, I’d probably wonder if I still had a voice.  I had one phone conversation all week, and it was a good one.  I think this was Friday, at least I am fairly certain that it was.  Also on Friday, I stopped at the church and spoke with the minister.  I told him, very excitedly, about my new book.  I asked him what this Sunday’s sermon was going to be about, but then told him that I was going to be there Sunday, and that I’d wait and find out and be surprised.  So that was intelligent conversation #2.  The third was with my primary care doctor when I saw her Wednesday.

You know, I will go for days, sometimes, days and days, without talking to anyone intelligently.  Maybe a word or two to a store clerk.  Or maybe I’ll talk to people, but I’m so insane that the words just float around, or I fake my way through a conversation and I’m out of my head and pretend my head’s okay, I just smile and nod but I can’t even concentrate on what’s being said.  I haven’t been Stark Raving Mad, as I’ve come to call it, for a number of days now, thankfully.  I am hoping that this stays at a minimum.

Last Sunday at church I was Stark Raving Mad.  I was completely out of my head.  But I was still me, and church was still church, which meant that I was still just as welcome there and church was still just as wonderful.  I did have to fake my way through conversations during social hour, nod and smile and stuff, but I wasn’t connected enough to be scared.  I’d say it was so weird and interesting that I didn’t get a chance to be scared, not at all.  The Director of Religious Education read a story to the children during the service, while all the children gathered up front to listen.  I heard the title of the book, then the rest just went off somewhere.  I told myself that if this was going to happen with a children’s book, then the sermon was going to be really tough for me to understand.  But I wouldn’t say that this was exactly the case.  The sermon was simply a different experience.  I didn’t hear the sermon the way I usually hear sermons.  I saw it laid out before me.   Kind of like a puzzle or a skeleton or a graph, something bare-bones that had to be put together.  As is the tendency when I’m Stark Raving Mad, I get a thought, and then the thought completely leaves my head as soon as it comes into my mind.  So all this was happening with this skeleton before me that I was trying to assemble.  I heard the congregation laugh periodically.  I heard snatches of words here, then gone.  I felt a heat rise in my chest at the end of the sermon and I felt the warmth of the words as the flowed and spun around, and I thought that something was there that had to do with being held close and protected and loved.  Something happened in the congregation just then, a bubbling, and then a release.

It wasn’t until much, much later, that night, or maybe the next night, yes, probably the next night, and I think it was in the shower, that I looked back, and suddenly I was able to recall the entire sermon!  Yet I couldn’t comprehend any of it while I was sitting in the church last Sunday.  Why this recall?  Memory is a very, very strange thing indeed.  As I sit here right now I realize that it is late, and I am truly exhausted, and at this exact moment, my memory of the sermon is only vague.  I have yet to read the online text of the sermon.  These are generally available shortly after Sundays, usually Monday or Tuesday.

Tomorrow is Sunday.  I am not thinking of having the opportunity for human interaction tomorrow.  That’s not really my primary concern in fact.  I think what I’m more focused on is showing up for church on time and remembering my name button.  That’s very basic stuff.  Church is church and I’ll get to sit there and be there and that’s the important part.  The music will be awesome and everything will be awesome because it always, always is.

Showing up is awesome.  Remember this.

Oh yeah, the coffee afterward is a great bonus, too.

I wasn’t even going to include this, but let me begin by saying that it reeks of garbage in here.  Yes, garbage.  Rotting veggies.  I’m considering packing up and going home.  Like, if I didn’t know better, I’d say I was going to be sick or something from the fumes.  But I’ve mentioned here before that I haven’t actually puked since 1997.  I can probably count the number of times I’ve puked in my lifetime, period, with the exception of this weird “phase” I went through sometime when I was in my 30′s that lasted, say, a couple of weeks.  Every time I smelled something the least bit offensive, like the tiniest fart, I’d throw up.  A “phase,” I guess.  It ended.  Let’s just say the library smells damn pukey right now.  Okay, enough.  Subject dropped.

I woke up this morning with a weird combination of a bad mood and a positive attitude.  I feel this sense of renewal over the new book, like awake and alive finally, a sense of purpose and future that I didn’t have before, a real reason for going on, a feeling of drive.  By bad mood I don’t mean clinically bad mood, that is, I don’t mean I was depressed, nothing like that.  I mean I was bitchy and annoyed.  I had a screamer headache.   Actually, I still have that screamer headache.  It’s very rare that I have one that hangs on, and in fact if I ever get a headache it lasts a few minutes, fifteen maybe at most, and then goes away.  I get them for a variety of reasons and they are never a big deal.  Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep, or too much sleep.  I take a couple of aspirins and drink a cup of coffee and that cures it, and if I don’t have time to make and drink coffee, I ingest a caffeine pill instead.  Today, it’s a genuine tension bitchy annoyed headache and that’s why it won’t quit.

My reasons for bitchy-annoyed: My DMH person is back from her six-week vacation.  Yes, six weeks.  I am aware that she is due back, of course, and expected her at 11.  I was very annoyed that I had to deal with all this today, knowing that she is chronically late.  I don’t mean just late, I mean very, very late, without notifying me.  Ever.  Like, I am a mental patient and therefore have nothing better to do but sit around on my ass, so it makes no difference when she shows up?  I’d been up late, way too late, my fault, didn’t want to drag my butt out of bed, was thinking of all kinds of ways to blow this whole thing off in case this was one of those rare occasions that she showed up anything like on time or within a half hour of on time.  I decided that I had a flu bug, but then, I didn’t need the flu bug at all, because noon came, and then 1pm…no show…I left the house and came here to the library.

Okay, something else completely unrelated I want to mention.  Yesterday.  I left the house in disgust.  Aw man, my headache is starting to pound just thinking about this.  I walk into my apartment with Puzzle.  We’ve just been out for a walk.  I’m planning to go out, and then suddenly I can hardly wait to bolt out to the library, because there is screaming, I mean screaming right outside my door.  What the fuck?  It’s the neighbors.  Again.  My fucking neighbors.  You wouldn’t believe these people.  This time, the shopping cart lady and someone that I think is her daughter.  The shopping cart lady is making her rounds in the hallway, and her daughter is strolling around with her, and they are having an argument.  They are screaming and yelling at each other while walking up and down the hallway.  Just tell me the logic in this.  Why the fuck can’t they have their screaming fight inside the shopping cart lady’s apartment instead of out there in the hallway where everyone has to hear it?  I’m not talking one or two minutes.  By the time I got my stuff into my knapsack and organized and my jacket on and Puzzle squared away, ten minutes had passed and those two were still screaming in the hall.

This has been a wicked bad rant about stupid trivial shit.  Thanks for listening.  Now I can get to work.

Sixteen was miserable for me, and I didn’t even have an illness.  I was just a confused kid.  I think all the kids were confused.  If you ask most people, they’ll talk about the “good times” they had at high school, and look on their times participating in clubs and teams as fun and exciting.  They’ll remember how fun it was to party with the other kids, and to get a little naughty.

Sixteen wasn’t like that for me.  None of high school was like that for me.  You’ll see this when you read This Hunger Is Secret.  The experiences I had in high school were more than unusual.  They were bizarre.  No, I was not mentally ill at the time.  I was involved in a very twisted, abusive friendship, and let me twist your arm a bit more and tell you that I was the one being abused.  Bullying?  I guess if you had to give it a name, any name, maybe it could be called that.

We’re talking about someone who called herself my best friend.  We were always, always together, she and I.  We were known for this.  Such pairings, these close friendships, are not unusual in high school, and on the surface it appeared that we were just another of those duos that are inseparable, occasionally to the point of getting on everyone’s nerves.

But I had a secret.  Actually, I was full of secrets.  This Hunger Is Secret was given that title for a reason.  In high school, I pasted a smile onto my face and made sure it stayed there all day long so no one would know that I felt like a complete fuck-up inside.  I hated being her slave and I hated that she ran my life and I hated that I didn’t have a life of my own.  I was so completely dominated by this girl that if I wanted to do something, I had to ask permission, and she knew my every move, all day long.  I had no privacy and no dignity.  I was allowed no other friends.  What friends I had previously watched her turn me into her robot, and she either stole my other friends and took them as her own, or rejected my prior friends, pushing me further into isolation.

Perhaps, if you have been in an abusive partnership, you can see stark similarities.  But we were thirteen years old when we met, freshmen in high school.  I had only started menstruating and wearing a bra the previous school year.  She was the same age.  We were children.

And no, this wasn’t a one-week experiment.  This lasted four years.  For four years, I pretended to be thrilled to have this really close friend.  I pretended to be having fun.  Pretending itself was fun and challenging.  I practiced my faces in the mirror.  As the abuse worsened, I challenged myself to see just how much I could take.  Problem was, it had already gone so far and so out of control that as a powerless child, there was nothing I could do to make it stop.

We met right away when freshman year started, in the high school band.  Come winter, my family got involved.  They invited her to come skiing with us.  Now, there were four kids: me, my two baby brothers, and my friend, who was also one of us kids, one of the family.  She was blonde and so were my brothers.  I have brown hair, so it looked like I was the friend and she and my brothers were the family.  She started calling my parents Mom and Dad.  They let her do this.  She started inviting herself to participate in family activities.  They let her do this.  My parents  encouraged and endorsed this friendship, saying it was the best thing that could have happened to me.  Do you see the trap I was in?  For the four years of high school it only got worse and worse.

She started bossing around my brothers.  They were very little, and didn’t know anything.  She bossed me around and hit me in front of my little brothers.  She started bossing around my parents.  They didn’t recognize that she was doing this.  Instead, they started doing things to try to please her.  But if you’d asked either of them, she was a faithful, generous friend to me and a wonderful addition to our family.  Our sick, sick family.

One of my brothers started acting up in school.  He got in trouble because of temper tantrums and bad behavior.  He got kicked out of a bunch of things and I guess you could say that at the time he had become a troubled kid.  He ended up having to see a shrink and we went to a family therapist as part of all this.  Family therapy was hopeless with my parents, the way they were, never really listening to us kids or to anyone for that matter.  We burned out three family therapists over a period of, I  guess, a year, probably less.  I was sixteen then.  My brother seems okay now, and is married and has kids and stuff.  We don’t talk about it.

I was sixteen then.  I didn’t have an illness, and I wasn’t messed up on drugs, but every day, I seriously considered taking my life.  Sometimes it seemed like the only way out.  I had no one to talk to.  Everyone thought I was happy.  If I had the guts to tell them what I thought and felt inside, and what I thought about my friend, they wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

I am asking you to believe me now.  When my memoir, This Hunger Is Secret: My Journeys Through Mental Illness and Wellness comes out, the truth will also come out.  My chapter, “Locker #47,” describes my high school years.  It is written in my voice, my voice at sixteen.  My memoir is already out as an e-book, but the paperback version will be out very, very soon and it will be worth the wait.  My story will be in print, on paper, as a book that people can hold, and turn the pages, and see what happened.  And this isn’t the only story in there, of course.  But with this publication happening within maybe a month, six weeks maybe, my life is going to change.  A lot.  The book isn’t just going to sit there.  I am going to publicize.  I want people to know what it’s like to have a mental illness.  I know it’s really hard to publicize and market a book, especially when you’re not the super aggressive pushy type, and not even sociable, but I’ve got a handful of ideas, and the burning desire to want my voice to be heard.

I was thinking all this while getting ready to take Puzzle out this morning, showering and brushing my teeth and the like, when I realized that today is January 20 already, about a year since I left McLean Hospital in 2011 and began The It Notebook, a journal that I kept while I was very ill.  I kept the journal for two months, then ended it.  I believe every entry can be found here at this blog.  I have not yet written the Introduction and Afterward of The It Notebook, which are the only two parts of the book that I will write in polished form.  The rest is written once, then left as is.  It is, after all, merely a journal.  I plan to print out maybe two dozen copies of this very short book, and sell them for cheap, a buck or two, at readings, to anyone who may be curious.  I consider this book to be a historical document of a very hard time of my life.  Much of it is written in verse.

But I asked myself, when I thought of The It Notebook, what I had done since.  What have I written?  I have not been involved in any project.  Not really.  I started a novel revision course but I didn’t have the mental capability to concentrate well enough or work consistently enough on it to follow through.  I am So Cold, and Hungry in My Soul, my fifth and favorite book, the novel I was trying to revise, remains in first draft form.  (Dang, I love that book.)  Besides this?

Besides this?  Besides this?  I have just turned 54 years old.  I have survived 53, the most hellish year anyone could possibly imagine, and for the entire year, every day, I came to the computer, and sat here for hours, blogging, writing about myself, yes, myself, telling the world exactly what I was experiencing, feeling and thinking.  I told the world about my suffering and misery.  I told the world things that I hadn’t told anyone before.   I wrote in my blog things I would never tell my therapist.  When I had no hope, I wrote about my hopelessness.  And when I felt that there was nothing left to live for, I said that, too.

I wrote so much about myself that I’d say that by now, I know myself very, very well.  I think I have so much understanding through my writing and so much will to share my words that it’s time to start writing a new memoir.

I started planning things out while walking Puzzle.  Chapters.  Topics.  What the heck I want this book to be about.  How I want to say it.  We came home.  I fed Puzzle, packed for the library, and left.  I stopped at the church on the way over and said hello to the minister.  He was the first to hear of my plans.  At the library, I wrote down notes longhand.  Just ideas.  Some came out as surprises.  Some were rather detailed.  Others came out in spurts.

But I had brought something with me that has never left the house.  It was my calories and weight notebook.  The secret notebook where I have written my food.  I began this notebook October 9, 2011.  The first page doesn’t contain any calories or food.  It has the letter “S” written on it.  S stands for starvation.  I didn’t want to write the whole word.  I was afraid, I guess, that someone might see it.  I read the entire notebook, from the beginning, in October, until now.  Then I wrote today’s entry.

“Friday, Jan 20, 2012
beginning my new book
My memoir about my anorexia
I did not eat today
Library.

Reading this entire notebook now
I have been so sick
I have put myself so close to death
Not just once or twice, but
every day that I have kept this notebook.  Begun Oct 9, 2011.

Not recorded: For a month at least, and ending mid-December, I bought 2 2L bottles diet soda, guzzled them @ night.  I stopped.

I still desire thinness and intend to continue starving myself.  This is how I survive.”

When the library closed, I walked over to CVS and bought a new notebook.  I decided to include the “S” notebook, along with last summer’s Starvation Spreadsheets, in my new memoir.  Somehow, I’ll figure out which parts need to be edited out.

After I got home, I read the entire “S” notebook again, and cried.  I’ll share some of it with you sometime.  Maybe.  Or maybe you’ll just have to wait for the paperback.

She’s probably 16.  I’m 54.  Same damn illness.

I recently discovered that it isn’t all that far to walk to my primary care physician’s office.  It’s about 40 minutes if I walk fast but not ridiculously fast, that is, not walking and constantly reminding myself, “Gotta get a move on!” but walking while listening to loud, raucous rock music and not really giving a shit about anything or anybody.  It took 20 minutes to get to the bike shop and the other 20 to get up a steep hill to Dr. K’s office.  Yeah, I timed myself.

But today the weather……..let me put it mildly: sucked.  This was the pits.  I can take rain, snow, sleet, thunderstorms (Puzzle would disagree), blazing heat I happen to love, sub-zero even (believe it or not), but this?  No way.  Today was miserable.  It was cold…and windy.  I hate windy weather.  We’re talking a biting wind that gets into your shoes, bites your face, goes through your hat and bites your earlobes, and goes up your sleeves and jeans.  The worst of the worst windy weather, for me, is the kind of windy weather that blows the sand on the street and the salt onto my glasses and then I can’t see.  It wasn’t that bad today but this wind put me in a wicked sour mood.  I mean wicked.  My doctor even asked me why my face looked “tan.”  Well geez.  I told her the damn cold, biting wind has been on it all day long.  And today, it got colder, and colder, and colder.  It started out above 50.  Trust me, it didn’t even feel close to that.  Then it dropped, and dropped and dropped.  Within a couple of hours, it had dropped 20 degrees.  I was not a pleasant person to be around.  Thankfully, no one was around me.

So my appointment was at 1pm.  When I got home from walking Puzzle I was faced with this question of cab or walking, which at this point was up for debate, given that I already knew about the afternoon’s predicted temperature drop and continuing sadistic winds.  I remembered the lively speculation I’d enjoyed while on our walk.  I had let my mind wander around, thinking of the Worst Case Scenario.

Say I walked to Dr. K’s office and froze my butt off.  I’d have frostbit toes, of course.  I’d be shivering and never really warm up, even though that building where her office is located is heated okay enough.  Then what happens?  I have to take my clothes off?  Dang!  So I go through all this examination rigamarole, and she isn’t too pleased to see me in such a shitty, negative mood.  I go home to my freezing cold apartment, and the only way I have at my disposal to warm up is to take a shower.  Of course the hot water isn’t working.  Now, the Housing Authority has decided to heat the hallway this year.  They have it heated plenty.  Why can’t they heat my apartment the way they heat the hallway?  I decide to do what I always do to warm this place up: I put ice on the thermostat.  I drop the ice on my foot.

That’s about as far as I got with the Worst Case Scenario.  Puzzle and I arrived back at my building, where I threw out Puzzle’s poops, and soon forgot about it all and stopped my silliness.  I’m only remembering it now.  But it was all this speculation that influenced my decision to break the bank and take a cab.  It is a five minute drive, depending on whether you make it through this certain traffic light before it turns red.  Whatever.

I’ll tell you my logic in all this.  Being in a wicked, wicked sour mood, and coming home and still being in a wicked sour mood, would make for a lousy day and a lousy night and might carry over into tomorrow.  It could rub off onto other people.  Not that I’m ever around anyone, but you never know.  Just vibes.  You know, negativity.

The cab ride was nine bucks.  That was super expensive, I must say, that plus I tipped, I think, another four or five bucks but I don’t really remember for sure.  Was it worth it?  Yep.  I stayed warm.  It was a little tough getting home, but there were no waits for buses.  I had a bit of a walk, but I stopped everywhere I could, like at the library and a couple of stores along the way, like, you know, window shopping, etc, just to stay warm, and I made it back.  And yes, I put ice on the thermostat for a bit.  Things could be worse.  Winter doesn’t last forever.  And I think the hot water is actually working tonight.

I just looked at the clock on my computer.  In a minute, my site blackout, protesting Internet censorship, will end, at 8pm.  The lights will come on again.  You will see me and read me again.  Maybe I, too, will see things in a new, different light.  Maybe it’s good to see things from all angles, positive and negative.  Maybe it’s good to see all possibilities and scenarios.

It is indeed possible that I may recover from my illness, anorexia nervosa.  I have read about people with all sorts of mental illnesses, deemed hopeless cases, either locked in back wards or on their death beds, who ended up making huge strides eventually against all odds and contrary to all predictions by not only “experts” but by everyone that knew them.

The thing about anorexia, and in the case of certain other mental illnesses, is that the sufferer doesn’t necessarily want to recover.  This is not due to selfishness or stupidity or because the person is “doing it to themselves,” but because of the nature of the illness, and if you think otherwise, then you are not educated about anorexia nervosa.  Schizophrenia can be this way at times.  Mania can be this way.  A person who is depressed, on the other hand, is often aware that he or she is depressed (but not always), and this awareness can be painful, as is, of course, depression itself.  Most people who are depressed wish to rid themselves of depression and be happy again.  I think this is a fair guess.  But you can’t say this of anorexia, because of the simple fact that the person with anorexia fears weight gain, and probably wants to lose more weight.  It’s as simple as that.

While in the shower this morning, I thought about the fact that I hadn’t weighed myself for…let’s see…simple math here…ten days.  I’m not about to break that record.  I can tell when I’m over x or under x.  I am just over.  I can determine this rather quickly.  I was able to guess within a pound what I weighed today, and I discovered that was absolutely correct in my estimate when I stepped on Dr. K’s scale.

My weight is okay.  I’m not going to freak.  My clothes fit and I can wear them just fine.  And I’d better wear my clothes.  The biting wind might be dying down, but it’s getting down to 14 degrees tonight and I sure as heck can’t go out there naked.

I am planning to black out the site beginning at 8am and ending at 8pm, Eastern Standard Time.  There will be a video that you can watch here.  If you have technical trouble getting the video to operate here on my site (I did during a test run) then I’m sure you’ll find it on plenty of other WordPress dot com blogs.

If you so desire, take action now and sign this petition.

Thanks.